Sunday, May 19, 2013

Hilary Clinton and Violence Against Women

When I was a little girl, there were no cool female role models. Well, there
was Wonder Woman, but she looked uncomfortable, like her breasts were about to
pop out of her swimsuit. My brother had his pick of cool heroes but I did not.
There were some spunky heroines, but in most television shows, the women, even
the smart ones, eventually had to be saved by men.

People need heroes in their own images. I remind my husband about this all
the time, because I love and appreciate all the women on television today who
don't need saving. They can fight like men. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) Even
without supernatural powers, they can win with smarts and a stun gun. (Veronica
Mars.) And by the way, both of these fictional women were created by men.

But lately I'm registering a disturbing trend with these characters: They
all get raped. I don’t know why I didn’t notice before.

Why do men who create strong female characters always make them get raped?

The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo so graphically details horrible abuses to women that I
began to wonder if the writer (and some readers) got a high from thinking about
the torture of women. The movie is worse. I had to leave the room during those
scenes. It's true, the female lead is smart and strong, and she gets vengeance.
But I don’t know how anyone could leave that film thinking women were
empowered.

I suppose the Ohio man who locked-up and raped three girls for ten years
might have enjoyed the scenes in that book/movie. And since one in six women
are sexually assaulted*, rapists are not so much an aberration as part of the
norm. There were the high school students who undressed, raped, ejaculated on,
and photographed an unconscious teenage girl while carting her from party to
party. There's that rap song where the singer (Rick Ross) brags about giving a
woman a drug and raping her while she's unconscious. On college campuses, as
many as one in four women are sexually assaulted**. In my state of Nebraska,
some third grade boys sexually assaulted an eight-year old classmate on the
school playground. The list goes on and on. I could write for an hour and not record all the sexual
assault stories that have happened in this year alone.

I could probably write all day and not have time to document the sexual
assaults occurring in the military. The Air Force official in charge of its
sexual-assault prevention program is arrested for attacking a woman in a
parking lot and the military's response is to "retrain" the men. Weird,
because I wouldn't think men need special training in not attacking
women. Shouldn't they just know? Like the way they know not to rob liquor
stores or step in front of a moving car?

Obviously, something in our culture is teaching boys and men to rape. Is it
simply the belief that women are less valuable than men? Is there a male rage
that can only be relieved by hate crimes against women? Rape is an act of
violence. Who is teaching our boys and men to be violent to women? Why do so
many male writers view rape as a rite of passage for strong women?

So where does Hilary Clinton come into all this? Well, we know she is
considering a run for president. I would like her to think carefully about her
legacy. Barack Obama has shown us how ineffective a president can be. The GOP
will devote themselves to blocking her like they do him. But they can't block
the light from her international stardom. She could affect much more change
taking on a single cause than trying to run our country. I'd like to see her
take on that fight. I'm not alone. My blog on her speech about violence against
women gets more hits than any other blog I've got. (And it's nothing but a
transcript of her speech).

There are men running our country who believe that women can shut down rape
sperm. Their brains are operating in medieval mode but that's who you have to
deal with in government politics, apparently. Sadly, the president has little
more influence than those politicians who seem proud of their ignorance.

Mrs. Clinton, I ask you from the bottom of my heart to forget about being
president and make it your mission to wipe out violence against women, in our country and in the world. I want a better world, not only for
my son and daughter, but for all the children of the world.

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